It was late and my girlfriend had retired in disgust. She was right to. I was immobile on the couch, watching live coverage of the Boston manhunt from an American broadcast, and dumbly forgiving of the rolling nothingness

In David Foster Wallace’s novel The Pale King, about—wait for it—the metaphysics of boredom in a bureaucracy, he writes: “True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.”

Two quotes and a movie was all it took. I scratched my Labor column. Others could examine the party’s existential nausea. I’d reached a combustible temperature on something else: rape and the creeps who defend it.

Canberra turns 100 this year, but awkwardly it seems Australians have forgotten its birthday. The Bush Capital must now be cursing its weird remoteness, and the fact that outside its borders ”Canberra” is not the name of a city, but shorthand for political bastardry.

It was not until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 that the world began to grasp the diabolical scale of repression in East Germany. The Stasi—East Germany’s secret police—may have overseen a fatally diseased economy…